Open Season on Viagra

Jamie Masada laughs as he recalls it: how the hottest new impotence drug had been on the market for only a day when the professional jokesters and hard-core humormeisters began injecting it into their acts.

There was the young woman comedian who, with deadpanned weariness, said nothing more to the audience at Masada’s Laugh Factory in Hollywood than: “My boyfriend’s been taking Viagra” and drew a roar.

As Viagra burrows its way into the American lexicon, it is dominating the comedy circuit, elbowing aside Monica Lewinsky and everything else in its path as the newest take on America’s obsession with bedroom miscues and physical faux pas.

Viagra humor is more than just one-liner material. Many comedians return to the topic again and again during a single 20-minute set. One 70-year-old comic performing at the Laugh Factory’s Tuesday open mike night rewrote his entire routine around the wonder drug.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Masada said. “Nobody ever did 15 straight minutes of Bill Clinton jokes. But Viagra has this strange comic staying power.”

The Laugh Factory owner says eight of every 10 comics at his club have employed some kind of Viagra joke in recent weeks.

Scott LaRose is one comedian who takes his Viagra humor seriously.

Last month, at the first news reports of the new drug, he hit the Internet and did his research. He even bought stock in the company.

At first, many in the audience didn’t get his jokes--the word on the drug had yet to make the rounds. Slowly, though, the laughter level rose to shattering levels.

“Today, all you literally have to do is say the word ‘Viagra’ and you can get laughs--you’ve got people’s attention,” LaRose said Tuesday. “Now the trick is to find some creative angles and just let the humor ride.”

LaRose says Viagra humor is more versatile than the nation’s last comic trend: jokes about President Clinton’s alleged Oval Office affair with White House intern Lewinsky.

“Nobody gets offended by Viagra jokes,” he said. “Because they don’t poke fun at anyone in particular but, in a sense, at all of us. With Clinton jokes, sooner or later, people will say ‘OK, enough with the president. Leave him alone.’ Nobody says that with Viagra.”

The comedy stage is only one arena where Viagra has moved out of the bedroom. Newspaper writers talk about “Viagra jolts” and of athletes protecting leads like they would “a pocketful of Viagra” and about the stock market rising like it took “a monster dose of Viagra.”

But not everyone is jumping onto the Viagra bandwagon.

*

On Tuesday, Scott LaRose and a handful of other aspiring comics stood in the rain outside the Laugh Factory, lining up to take a shot at the club’s open mike later that night.

Some said Viagra was too topical: the yuck it up stuff of a Jay Leno monologue, perhaps, but not something that worked with well-timed comedy sketches.

“It’s just not that funny,” said one twentysomething comedian. “People of my generation don’t have to worry about that kind of thing. Anyway, everybody else is doing it, so I want to come up with something fresh.”

Another comedian, Melinda Contreras, said that while she bases most of her routine around children’s television, she wouldn’t be adverse to throwing a bit of Viagra humor into the mix.

“Look at it this way, she said. “Since the drug was approved, the birth rate in Fort Meyers, Fla. has gone up 100%. That’s got to be a good thing.”

Comic Paul Sheflin added: “In a matter of days, Viagra has single-handedly revived the national prominence of Bob Dole.”

Comics know audiences are always thrilled when someone sheds a humorous light on tight-lipped subjects such as sex. “And impotence, not all that funny in real life, is always funny onstage,” said comic Jim Coughlin of St. Louis as he waited outside the Laugh Factory. “It gets right to the very human condition of weakness at the most inopportune moment.”

Nobody can predict for sure Viagra’s comic shelf life. But in the fluid world of stand-up comedy, the joke tellers will be watching for that first sign of audience indifference.

“When you get the groans, like you do with most Monica jokes these days, you’ll know its time has passed, that it’s time to move on,” said comic Gerry Bednob.

For LaRose, Viagra has raised the level of his onstage humor. Now, the Rhode Island native says “the challenge is to write some good material using both Viagra and President Clinton.”